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The engraver Thomas Bewick described the tiny woodcuts that adorned his History of British Birds (1804) as 'tale-pieces' - images of nature that told some truth or moral about the world. Working directly from observations of his surroundings, Bewick's vivid images recorded a vanishing way of life in rural England. The artists in Miss Rowe's Footsteps draw from naturalist imagery to re-write forgotten histories, reclaiming maps and prints as the source material for works which comment upon the fragile balance of nature or pay tribute to forgotten artists whose works are a record of flora and fauna now endangered or extinct. Drawing, cutting, collaging and utilising craft traditions such as embroidery and stencilling these artists re-fashion material for their own imaginative purposes. Mandy Bonnell's residency at the Alber's Foundation in 2009 enabled her to study the Victorian botanist Miss Rowe, whose work is held in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Bonnell's drawings, made in response to Miss Rowe's watercoloured envelopes, will act as the basis to an artist's book she is developing with the poet Gabriel Gbadamosi. Claire Brewster's delicate cut outs fashion images of nature from the pages of urban maps and atlases. Her work reminds how nature can take over in even the most neglected of environments: "… birds, insects and flowers transcend borders and pass freely between countries with scant regard for the rules of immigration or the effects of biodiversity." Tracey Bush's work celebrates the art of Mrs Mary Delany, whose paper collages faithfully recorded species of flora indigenous to 18C Georgian England. Bush's project Nine Wild Plants contrasts the lack of contemporary knowledge about British plants to the abundant recognition of logo-types, in a series of beautifully rendered botanical drawings into which she has collaged found examples of familiar brand names. Julie Cockburn's interventions into found materials, sees the artist as a kind of Mary Shelley re-making fictions of identity and investing images with readings of her own. In Bird and Pretty Polly she embroiders a parrot's head over the portraits of two 19C engravings, evoking a sense of wonderment that explorers must have felt seeing new species for the first time. A chance discovery of a Bewick engraving in a junk shop led the artist Helen Ireland to initiate a series of works in which she has repainted details of the engraver's marks onto small wooden supports. Concentrating on fragments of the imagery she celebrates the intricacy of the original whilst making an entirely contemporary comment upon the language of mark making. For further details please contact the Eagle Gallery on + 44 (0) 207 833 2674
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